And she walked backwards towards the door, throwing him kisses; but once on the other side of the hangings her expression of youthful lightheartedness vanished. Her lips were twisted with scorn and a look of frantic ferocity glittered in her eyes.
Her husband too, when he was alone, lost the momentary happiness Elena’s caresses had afforded him. There lay those letters, and his mother’s appeal.... He sat at the table, his face in his hands. All his anxieties had swooped down upon him, he could scarcely breathe in the thick swarm.
Always, at such moments, Torre Bianca called up memories of his youth as though they could offer him a remedy for present troubles. The happiest time in his life had been that period when he had been a student in the Engineering School at Lièges. Eager to restore the fallen splendor of his house, he had thrown himself into his preparations for a modern career, in order to set out on the conquest of money, just as his remote ancestors had done. Before royalty had bestowed a title upon them, they had been Florentine merchants, like the Medicis, travelling even to the Orient in their pursuit of fortune. Federico de Torre Bianca wanted to be an engineer for the same reason that all the other youths of his generation did, in order to make Italy, once famous for her art, an important modern nation because of her industries.
As he recalled his student life the first image that arose was that of Manuel Robledo, his friend and classmate. Manuel was a Spanish youth whose frank and happy disposition made it possible for him to meet daily problems with quiet energy. For several years he had played the part of older brother to the distinguished young Italian, and Torre Bianca never failed to think of his friend in difficult moments.
He was such a good fellow! Not even his successive love affairs could destroy his serenity. He had the poise of a mature man, perhaps because the important interests of his life were good eating and the guitar....
Torre Bianca, who was endowed with a fatal facility for falling in love, went about in those days with one of the pretty girls of Liège, and Robledo, out of good fellowship, feigned an absorbing interest in one of her friends. As a matter of fact he was always much more attentive to the culinary activities of their parties than to the not very insistent claims of sentiment.
Yet Bianca had come to discern through this somewhat noisy and unquestionably materialistic joviality of his friend a certain leaning towards the romantic which Robledo tried manfully to hide, as though it were a shameful weakness. Perhaps, in his country, there had been some experience.... So often, at night, the Italian boy, stretched on his dormitory bed, heard the guitar softly moaning as Robledo hummed the lovesongs of his far-away homeland.... Their course over, the friends had parted, expecting to meet as usual the following year; but that meeting had never occurred. While Torre Bianca remained in Europe, Robledo roved about through South America, for the most part in his capacity as engineer, but now and then he went through an extraordinary transformation, as though his Spanish blood made it imperative that some of the old Conquistadores should live in him once more.
At rare intervals he wrote to Torre, but his letters contained more illusions to the past than to the present. Yet somehow, in spite of his discreet reticence, Torre Bianca gathered that his chum had become a general in one of the small republics of Central America.
It was two years now since he had heard from Robledo, whose last letter announced that he was employed in Argentine, having had enough, for the time being, of those countries still continually shaken by revolution. He was contracting for the government as well as for private undertakings, and constructing canals and railroads; and through all the discomforts of the rough life he led, the belief that he was helping the advance guard of civilization to cross one of the earth’s desert places, gave him intimate satisfaction and happiness.
Torre had among his papers a photograph of his friend in which Robledo appeared on horseback, wearing an African helmet and a poncho that fell over his shoulders. Several half-breeds were planting linesman’s flags on the mesa which, for the first time since creation, was to receive the imprint of material civilization. Robledo, who was of the same age as himself, must have been thirty-seven when the photograph was taken; yet he looked many years younger than Torre Bianca did at forty.